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Transcript of Richard Currey on The Things They Carried

Richard Currey: On the surface of this beautifully rendered story, The Things They Carried, it’s about an infantry platoon on patrol in Vietnam, and what happens to them. But interlaced throughout the book is Tim O’Brien’s personal question that he shares with us, because it’s never really answered about what is true, what is not, how does the memory function, how precise can we ever be? Particularly when what’s being witnessed, participated in, or experienced is so extraordinarily extreme.

Tim returns frequently to the idea that war stories are essentially the oldest stories. They are very difficult and/or, and this is one of the marvelous points of The Things They Carried, that they are simultaneously unbelievable and absolutely true. Tim returns to this idea a number of times in the book. And I think it’s very instructive, it educates us all about what is the nature of war. The phantasmagorical, extraordinary human experience that it is that later becomes in some way indescribable. And Tim’s prose, with its extraordinary lucidity and clarity throughout, is still working and approaching this fundamental conundrum about writing about war in that it is fundamentally indescribable, unbelievable, and tests the limits of our imagination to recast it in any kind of sensible way.

According to Currey, in The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien holds a "mirror up to us as humans and to our culture and our history and say(s), 'Look, you know, we can’t really come to grips with any momentous experience unless we learn how to mold that into a story.'" [1:43]